Gonzalo Barr

After your reading, you take a few questions from the audience.  “Where do you get your ideas?” asks a man in the back.

The question is simple.  Short.  Compact.

Six words.

Direct.

Be nice to the man.  He was you not so long ago.  He is only trying to figure out how to cross the great divide between being unpublished and being published.

How do you answer it?

“You strip-mine your memories,” you say.  “Or the newspaper.”  You remember John Dufresne’s comment about getting some of his best ideas from the tabloids, so you mention that too.

An idea can jump out of an article in Art News or an overheard conversation on an airplane.  It can manifest itself in the color of the sea as you wade out from the shore.

One good source for ideas, a rich vein that is almost guaranteed to give you plenty of material, is air travel.  Airports and airplanes are cauldrons simmering with stories.  The experience of being in one or the other is as far removed from the genteel (nothing happens) elegance of traveling by train or ship or even airliners in the first half of the twentieth century, as a dollop of lumpfish eggs is from a spoonful of sevruga.

Air travel wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Anyone old enough or resourceful enough has seen the images of what it used to be like.  Air travel was modeled after the experience of crossing the Atlantic on a great ocean liner, like the Queen Mary.  It wasn’t a package deal.  It was an occasion.  “What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?” Julia Mottram asked Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited after confessing that she was busy until lunch with a masseuse.

As late as the mid-1970s, airlines served you food on real china, with real utensils, and flight attendants (called “stewards” and “stewardesses” then) were there mostly to make your flight pleasant not, as they claim today, for your safety.

I fly at least 50,000 air miles each year.  Between my day job and my writing, sometimes I fly over 100,000 air miles.  (Just a few years ago, I used to fly 100,000 miles yearly.)  It is amazing to me how airlines can manage thousands of flights each day without a major mishap.  Most of the flight attendants I’ve met are dedicated.  They do something I could never do, which is deal with the public.  I’m a writer.  I like solitude.  Having someone wave me over because his coffee is not warm enough is not my thing.  Fortunately for the traveling public, I elected another career.  Most airline personnel are courteous, patient, and professional.  But there are enough exceptions to the rule that you can count on air travel to provide you with a steady stream of ideas on what to write next.

Here are two of mine:

You’re on the red-eye from Los Angeles to Miami.  The flight leaves LAX after nine.  Less than five hours later, it arrives in Miami at 5:00 a.m.  If you are tired after a long day in L.A., you will be exhausted after a long flight in which falling asleep is almost impossible.

You are in your seat, next to the aisle, reading, when a backpack flies inches in front of your face.  Before you have a chance to acknowledge the passenger who is trying to get to the window seat next to you, he climbs over your legs.  In his free hand, he holds a fur-trimmed leather pouch that he hangs on the back of the seat in front of him.  The man looks like he lives very close to nature.  He wears worn jeans and a lot of brown leather.  His backpack is dirty, way past the point where you would have tossed it and bought a new one.

Later, while the plane is climbing, doing a slow u-turn over the Pacific before heading east, Jungle Jim (which is what you named the fellow) opens the pouch.  You try not to look.  You try to focus on the book in front of you, but the motion of what looks in your peripheral vision like a little animal distracts you.  In fact, it is a brown-furred animal with the face of a dazed rat.  Its snout sniffs the air.

“Oh, how cute!” a flight attendant leans over you to get a better look at the animal.  “What is it?”

“It’s a baby kangaroo,” Jungle Jim says.

“Oh my God!” another flight attendant joins the first.  Jungle Jim says that the kangaroo is a few days old, too young to be out of the pouch yet, which is like a substitute for its mother.  He says that the pouch also works as a diaper.

“What happens when it goes to the bathroom?” asks flight attendant number two.

“I have another pouch,” Jungle Jim says.

It’s a couple of hours later, somewhere over Texas, the air smells like caged gerbil and ammonia.  You reach up to open the air nozzle as far as it will go.  You point the nozzle directly at your face.  The air is very cold and you will likely lose the tip of your nose to frost bite before you reach Louisiana, but at least you can’t smell the cute, furried animal’s waste products any more.

Jungle Jim unclicks his seat belt and grabs the pouch.  He takes a second, empty pouch.  Before he can climb over you, you stand in the aisle and give him plenty of room.  He locks himself in the lavatory for half an hour.  You enjoy the time alone.  The air seems lighter too.

Jungle Jim steps out of the lavatory.  The flight attendants stop him in the galley and play with the kangaroo, now in a clean pouch.  Jungle Jim holds the other pouch closed by the neck.  One of the flight attendant, clearly uninformed about what you do with a soiled kangaroo pouch, offers to discard it for him, like a disposable diaper.  Jungle Jim waves her off.

Fifteen minutes later, he returns to the seat.  You step out to let him through.  “Would you mind holding this?,” he says, lifting the used pouch in your direction.  You pretend that you don’t hear or don’t understand.  Your face assumes the expression for No comprendo.  You shrug your shoulders too, for emphasis.

Jungle Jim tosses the used pouch on the floor.  He carefully hangs the kangaroo on the back of the seat in front of him.  Then he settles in for the rest of the flight.  The kangaroo lies deep within the pouch.  It does not move.

You adjust the nozzle and try to read some more, but it is late and you are tired.  Soon, you turn off the light, recline the seat as far as it will go, and close your eyes, wondering if baby kangaroos dream at all.

Here’s another story:

It’s Friday, the end of a long week.  You’re in Los Angeles again, looking forward to getting back home.  You’re also looking forward to a weekend of writing.  Weekends are good for that.  You can work past noon without interruption.

You take the afternoon flight that gets you to Miami at 10:00 p.m.  It’s not as gruelling as the red-eye.  You can even work on the plane, if you like.

Then you learn that your flight is late.  First one hour late.  Then four hours late.  The ”equipment” has to be brought in from Chicago.  “Equipment” is Airliner (a form of needlessly jargoned and ungrammatical English) for “airplane.”  OK.  It’s bad news, but it could be worse.  They could have canceled your flight.  Anyway, you are member of the airline’s club, which is quiet and comfortable.

You check into the club and take the elevator to the second floor.  A colleague from work is with you, which is a good and lucky thing, considering what is about to happen.

The elevator doors close.  There is a long rumble, followed by a sudden start.  You almost lose your balance.

“That’s not fun,” you say.  You’re calm.  But you remember the last time you were stuck in an elevator.  You surprised yourself at how scary being stuck in an elevator can be.

“Press Open Doors,” your colleague says.  “See what happens.”

You do that.  Nothing.  You press Close Doors.  Nothing.  You press Open Doors and Close Doors.  Nothing.  Then Close Doors, followed by Open Doors.

Your colleague starts to pry the doors open.  You help.  Between the two of you, the doors open about an inch, enough to see that the elevator is not level with the floor.

“Anybody out there?” you ask.  “Maybe we can get help.”

“There’s a guy smiling.  He thinks this is funny.”

You peer between the doors and see a middle-aged guy with long silver hair in a pony tail.  Yup.  He’s smiling.

“Hey!” your colleague shouts, but the guy turns around and steps into the other elevator.  You imagine all sorts of really bad things happening to the guy.  You imagine his head exploding into a million pieces.

That makes you feel better.

You ring the bell.  You press the button for emergency calls.  The speaker makes noises like a touchtone phone.  Then it stops.  ”Hello?” you say into the speaker, not sure where the microphone is.  A dialtone.  Click.

You try again.  You say the number of the terminal and the number of the elevator, which are on a plaque above the instrument panel.  It sounds like someone is talking but you can’t make anything out.  A dialtone.  Click.

“Is it hot in here?” your colleague says.  And it is.  He takes off his jacket.  You keep yours on.

You press the bell and don’t let go.  “The squeeky wheel…” you start to say, but you’re getting mad at the fact that no one has come to help.  Your colleague returns to the doors and tries to pry them open.  The elevator lurches and drops.  At least you’re level with the floor again.

A woman from the airline is outside.  She says that she tried calling maintenance, the airport, 911, but no one answered.  You don’t believe her.  How can no one answer?  This is Los Angeles, one of the busiest airports in the world.  Surely they have a system in place to deal with emergencies like this.

Ten minutes go by and still no help.  The two of you pry the elevator doors open as far as you can.  You use your foot to get more leverage.  The doors open enough that one person at a time can squeeze through.

There’s a young couple on the other side.  He’s prying open the outside doors.  You’re prying open the inside doors.  You’re pushing with your right leg as hard as you can until something snaps inside the doors.

“I think we broke something,” your colleague says.

“Fuck that!” you say.

While holding the doors open, you pass the bags through.  The girlfriend takes them.  Your colleague squeezes through.  You follow.

Outside the elevator, the air is much cooler.  You thank the young fellow and his girlfriend.  You want to do something to show your thanks, but they have a flight to catch and don’t stay long.  You estimate that you were stuck in the elevator at least twenty minutes.  The woman from the airline insists that she tried calling everyone.  “You don’t know how sorry I am.”

The club is a good place to relax, away from the crowds and the noise of the concourse.  There are snacks and drinks of all kinds.  There are two kinds of vodka.

You try them both.  First one.  Then the other.   Then again, just to make sure you determine which one you like more.

When it is time to board, we take the stairs down and walk past the elevator.  There’s a sign taped to the elevator doors.  “Out Of Service,” the sign reads.   “Sorry for the incovenience.”  The hand prints are still on the door, which means that over four hours after we were first trapped, no one — not maintenance or the airport — has reponded to what was once an emergency.

Tomorrow morning, Monday, I go back to Los Angeles.  Maybe the elevator will be fixed by then.  I’ll make it a point to go by the club the minute I land and take a look.  The findings will be reported here Monday afternoon.

Tuesday I’m in San Francisco.  Wednesday New York.  Friday I return to Miami.  That’s plenty of frequent flyer miles.  Maybe there will be another story.  Or maybe it will be an unevenful trip with nothing to report.  An uneventful trip would be nice, almost heavenly.  As the Talkingheads sang 28 years ago next month — “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Photos and images:  College of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina webpage on caviar; Growing Grassroots Networks, Australia kangaroo sign; David Cronenberg “Scanners” (1981) the rest of the photos are mine

Books and Books has organized four literary luncheons.  The last one, on August 15, 2007, will discuss my book, The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa.  I am happy to report that the public’s response has been very enthusiastic.  There will be a discussion leader and I will attend the event.

I can’t thank the people at Books and Books enough for their warm support of my work.

This is not exactly news.  The book was released in late 2006, but I didn’t know anything like it existed.  Gary Scharnhorst has edited interviews of Mark Twain into a 768-page book, Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, published by University of Alabama Press.  From the book description –

This volume is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain spanning his entire career.  In these interviews, Twain discusses such topical issues as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers (Howells, Gorky, George Bernard Shaw, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Hawthorne, Dickens, Bret Harte, among others).

Unfortunately, it is only available in hardback at $75.00.  Nonetheless, it has to be a book that is worthwhile to read, if not to have, don’t you think?

Discovering the previously unknown work of a great writer is always important news.  The Spanish paper, El país, today reports that Luis Vargas Saavedra, a scholar and specialist in the life and works of the Nobel-prize winning Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, found previously unknown poems, letters, and photographs filed away in boxes.  The literary cache was in the home of Doris Dana, who was Mistral’s assistant until the poet’s death, and who became her literary heir.  The boxes lay hidden in Dana’s Massachusetts home for fifty years, until her own death, when her executrix asked Vargas Saavedra to examine the “unknown treasure.”  Vargas Saavedra has photographed 860 pages containing 78 previously unknown poems, 500 letters, and five leather-bound photo albums with pictures of Mistral, her son, and her family.  Dana’s heirs have agreed to send everything to Chile once the work of indexing and cataloguing is completed.

Mistral will always evoke for me that afternoon when I first discovered her poems in my great-uncle’s library.  One wall was hidden by glass-fronted bookcases made of dark mahogany.  The doors to the bookcases each had a small keyhole, but fortunately they were unlocked.  Inside, the bookcases smelled of cedarwood.

There were medical and surgical textbooks, which was no surprise, as my great-uncle was a surgeon.  There were also two bookcases filled with novels and poems.  I used to visit my grandmother and her family for the summer, so I’m sure that I must have spent more than one afternoon paging through my great-uncle’s books.  But it is Mistral’s little book of poems, dark green leather-grained cover with Bible-thin pages, that I remember most.

Photo:  Gabriela Mistral, Hispanic and Portuguese Collection, US Library of Congress; Source: “100 poemas de una Premio Nobel, dentro de varias cajas,” El país (July 23, 2007)

Every so often someone chooses a classic novel, makes a few changes, types it up, and submits it to unsuspecting publishers as an original work.  The following statement will not surprise anyone, I hope — the number of novels accepted for publication is a tiny fraction of the number of manuscripts submitted to publishers for their review.  So it should come as no surprise that the thinly-disguised classic is rejected as well. 

Nonetheless, some people take the rejection of the plagiarized classic as proof that:  (1) getting published without an agent is difficult,  (2) publishers don’t know their classics, and (3)  [insert classic author’s name here] would have trouble getting published today.

David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, sent 18 manuscripts to publishers in the UK.  He sent the manuscripts as his own work when they were really chapters of Austen’s novels.  All the publishers turned him down.  One publisher was kind enough to recommend that he not parrot Austen’s style so closely.  Not surprisingly, this latest edition of the prank was picked up by the press. 

Reuters filed the story under “Oddly Enough.”  The Guardian published it as “news.”  Jean Hannah Edelstein, in the same paper, recounted other recent editions of this prank –

Trying to shame publishers by sending out faintly disguised published books is not a particularly unusual trick.  The Sunday Times did it last year on a slow news day with books by VS Naipaul and Stanley Middleton; Doris Lessing did it way back in 1984, submitting her own work with a pseudonym.  All that it proves is that getting published is tough and that publishers aren’t perfect, which was already clear.

Sources: “Publishers fail to spot plagiarized Jane Austen,” Reuters (July 19, 2007), Steven Morris, “The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers’ pride and prejudice,” The Guardian (July 19, 2007), Jean Hannah Edelstein, “Haven’t we seen the bogus manuscript before?” The Guardian (July 19, 2007)

The Literary Conversations Series, published by the University Press of Mississippi, is a gold mine of advice for a writer.  Each book in the series contains edited interviews with one author.  The interviews often span the career of the author.

Conversations With Don DeLillo (2005), capably edited by Thomas DePietro, contains an interview that Adam Begley did of Don DeLillo in 1993 for The Paris Review.  The following paragraph in the interview caught my attention –

Interviewer:  How do you begin?  What are the raw materials of a story?

DeLillo:  I think the scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place.  It’s visual, it’s Technicolor — something I see in a vague way.  Then sentence by sentence into the breach.  No outlines — maybe a short list of items, chronological, that may represent the next twenty pages.  But the basic work is built around the sentence.  That is what I mean when I call myself a writer.  I construct sentences.  There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence.  And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality.  They form odd correspondences.  They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.  The rhythm of the sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables.  One syllable too many, I look for another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable sequence — these are sensuous pleasures.

Is it any wonder that writers create using their ears as much as their eyes, sculpting the sound of their sentences, even as they look for a metaphor that resonates true?

Photo:  One of several Underworld notebooks kept by DeLillo.  Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Sources: Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo,” The Paris Review (Fall 1993), quoted in, Thomas DePietro (editor), Conversations with Don DeLillo (2005)

Sarah Kinson of The Guardian interviewed Hari Kunzru and asked the usual questions. 

What made you want to write when you were starting out?

Frustration (at the world) and gratitude (to all the writers who let me escape it, temporarily).

[…] 

What makes you write now?

Coffee.

How do you write?

I write notes in an A5 spiral bound notebook (I have a particular brand I like) but compose straight onto the screen. I try, more or less, to write during working hours. Living in London it’s difficult to escape [the] culture of 9-to-5 work.

Honoré de Balzac wrote 90 novels and novellas powered up on coffee.  We’ve read about alcohol and writing.  Maybe it’s time someone wrote a book about coffee and writing.

Source:  Sarah Kinson, “Hari Kunzru,” The Guardian (July 11, 2007)

Leon Neyfakh published in The New York Observer an article where he purports to ferret out who among three writers really interviewed Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., last before his death on April 11, 2007.  The three interviewers, who unknowingly participated in Neyfakh’s race, were John Hockenberry, Heather Augustyn, and J. Rentilly.  Hockenberry, host of “The Infinite Mind,” and Vonnegut appeared as animated characters in an interview that was posted on line in August 2006.  It was posted again in October 2006.  Heather Augustyn, of In These Times, claimed that hers was Vonnegut’s last interview.  She spoke with him by phone on February 28, 2007.  J. Rentilly of U.S. Airways’s in-flight magazine, Attaché, interviewed Vonnegut on March 6, 2007.  As time flows in one direction, even for Vonnegut, it should be simple to take these three facts and conclude that Rentilly nabbed the last interview. 

Well, not so fast, says Neyfakh.  It turns out that Rentilly included in the interview two quotes from a previous interview that was published in McSweeney’s on April 12, 2007.

Sources:  Leon Neyfakh, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Final Interview(s),” The New York Observer (July 10, 2007), Heather Augustyn, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Last Interview,” In These Times (May 9, 2007), J. Rentilly, “The Best Jokes Are Dangerous:  An Interview With Kurt Vonnegut, Part One,” McSweeney’s (April 12, 2007)

Author interviews look very much alike.  Pick up any one of the Literary Conversations series, published by University of Mississippi Press, as I did recently, and you’ll notice the same questions being asked by different interviewers of unrelated writers.  “Name some writers who have influenced your work,” is one.  “Name some writers with whom you have affinities,” is another.  The late Julio Cortázar expressed his frustration with author interviews in his short story, “Apocalípsis en Solantiname,”

Hacía uno de esos calores y para peor todo empezaba en seguida, conferencia de prensa con lo de siempre, por qué no vivís en tu patria, qué pasó que Blow Up era tan distinto de tu cuento, te parece que el escritor tiene que estar comprometido? A esta altura de las cosas ya sé que la última entrevista me la harán en las puertas del infierno y seguro que serán las mismas preguntas, y si por caso es chez San Pedro la cosa no va a cambiar, a usted no le parece que allá abajo escribía demasiado hermético para el pueblo?

***

There was one of those heat waves and worse, everything was starting right away, the press conference with same questions – why don’t you live in your country, what happened with Blow Up that it was so different from your story, do you think that a writer has to be committed? At this point in my life, I know that my last interview will take place at the doors of hell and surely they will be the same questions and if by chance it takes place chez Saint Peter nothing will change – do you think that down there you wrote too hermetically for the public?  (all translations mine)

Iván Thays, in his literary blog in Spanish, “Moleskine Literario,” a few days ago reported about the unusual interview of Mario Vargas Llosa that was published on July 1, 2007 in the supplement to the Madrid daily El mundo.  The interview took place in the Spanish capital’s wax museum, where a statue of Vargas Llosa was added recently.  If the author was asked any of the usual questions, they were not included in the article.  Instead, he is recorded commenting on the wax figures, real and fictional, including his own –

Borges dice … Cuando uno se mira en un espejo no se reconoce.  Al ponerme ante mi efigie, he sentido una gran incomodidad, como si alguien estuviera usurpando algo que es mío.

***

Borges says that … One does not recognize himself in a mirror.  But standing before this effigy, I feel a great discomfort, as if someone were usurping a thing that is mine.

His wax figure stood next to those of García Lorca, José Camilo Cela, Pablo Neruda, and others.  One of the interviewers handed Vargas Llosa a hunting knife (I assume he took the knife from another exhibit, but who knows) and asked the author to stab his own wax figure.  The author refused.

The interview took place late afternoon on a Tuesday this last Spring.  The museum was crowded.  A young woman stopped and said to Vargas Llosa, “Hey, your name sounds familiar.  Are you famous?  Will you give me your autograph?”

Later, examining the wax figure of Fidel Castro, he said –

Este hombre tiene el dudoso honor de ser el dictador más longevo de la historia de América Latina, que ha tenido una buena colección de dictadores.  Ha aniquilado prácticamente la evolución, el progreso y ha mantenido su país en el oscurantismo político y el fracaso económico más atroz.  Al principio parecía lo que muchos buscábamos: una revolución que consiguiera la libertad con la justicia.  Yo creí en la revolución, pero fue una mera ilusión.

***

This man has the dubious honor of being the longest-lived dictator in the history of Latin America, which has had a large collection of dictators.  He has practically annihilated evolution, progress, and has maintained his country in political darkness and the most atrocious economic failure.  At the beginning, he seemed to be what we were looking for: a revolution that would attain freedom with justice.  I believed in the revolution, but it was a mere ilusion.

At another time, kneeling next to the figure of Shakespeare’s heroine, Juliet Capulet, he was asked –

–¿Se enamora usted de sus personajes femeninos?

–Siempre.

–¿Con cuál de ellos se queda?

–La que tengo más presente naturalmente es la niña mala [Travesuras de la niña mala, de 2006, es su última novela].  Entre las niñas buenas y las niñas malas uno siempre prefiere a las malas, eso no hay ninguna duda.  Julieta era una niña pura, buena, inocente, pero en general las niñas malas son las heroínas de la literatura.  Generalmente son unos personajes trágicos que suelen pagar en la vida sus maldades.

***

– Do you fall in love with your female characters?

– Always.

– Which one of them have you stayed with?

– The one I have most present, naturally, is the Bad Girl [The Bad Girl, to be released October 2007, Edith Grossman, translator].  Between good girls and bad girls, one always prefers the bad ones, without a doubt.  Juliet was a pure girl, good, innocent, but generally, bad girls are the heroines of literature.  Generally, they are tragic characters who tend to pay in life for their mischief.

This unique interview is accompanied by photographs that are uniquely silly, rather than inventive.  There’s Vargas Llosa arms crossed and staring down Castro.  Vargas Llosa across the table from a pensive Miguel de Cervantes.  And the silliest photograph – the interviewers’ second attempt to execute the author.  Having failed to convince Vargas Llosa to stab his own figure, they managed to get him to kneel among the wax figures that recreated Francisco Goya’s Dos de mayo.   And so we have Vargas Llosa holding up his hands, kneeling, about to be executed by Bonapartist troops.  Whether the wax troops fired, the interviewers don’t say.

Photo: Mario Vargas Llosa posing with wax figures recreating 2 de mayo by Francisco Goya, C. Conesa in El mundo (July 1, 2007); Source: A. G. Mateache y A. Malvar, “El escritor da vida a personajes de cera,” El mundo (July 1, 2007)

My friend, Turner Davies, tipped me off to an essay by Haruki Murakami in The New York Times, July 8, 2007 edition.  The essay is entitled, “Jazz Messenger.”  In it, Murakami explains his views on writing,

“Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm.  Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.  […] Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm.  […] Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words.  Then comes the part I like best:  free improvisation.  Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside.  All I have to do is get into the flow.  Finally comes what may be the most important thing:  that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful.  And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience).  

[…]  There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.

Source: Haruki Murakami, “Jazz Messenger,” The New York Times (July 8, 2007).